


Cool Like George McFly

by picarats



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series)
Genre: 80s Movie Tropes (And How), Fix-It of Sorts, Friendship, Geeks, Gen, Pop Culture, Season/Series 01, self-awareness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29116323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picarats/pseuds/picarats
Summary: The first thing Demetri thought when he saw Eli on Monday morning wasHoly shit, our Subway Surfers cosplay is going to be the best at Comic Con this year if the test wig looks that good. Then he squinted a little harder, realised that Comic Con had already come and gone and thought,Holy shit, is he wearing extensions?(Set mid-Season 1.)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Cool Like George McFly

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

The first thing Demetri thought when he saw Eli on Monday morning was _Holy shit, our Subway Surfers cosplay is going to be the best at Comic Con this year if the test wig looks that good._

…Then he squinted a little harder — hey, he lost his glasses last week during a ‘Let’s Kick the Shit out of The Geek Like We’re Bullies from an 80s Film’ session from Kyler — realised that Comic Con had already come and gone and thought, _Holy shit, is he wearing extensions?_

“What on Earth is that?” Demetri settled on.

Eli gave him a Look, the kind that rattled his nerves as a response that came from years of being picked on and bullied. He blinked. “What?”

“That,” Demetri said, with more emphasis. He gestured at the mohawk that had more presence in homeroom than he did.

“It’s a Mohawk,” Miguel said.

“I know that,” said Demetri.

Eli scoffed. “Then why the hell did you ask?”

Demetri internally bristled. Then he straightened his back, because life was not a Christian Minecraft server. “It’s not very you, Eli. Back me up here, Miguel.”

Miguel shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it looks badass,” he said. He did a weirdly intricate handshake with Eli, the kind that made it look like they’d been friends for years instead of a few short weeks. _Traitor_.

“Thanks, dude,” Eli said. He turned to Demetri. The mohawk blocked out the light from the window. If he stayed like that, Demetri thought, maybe he wouldn’t get the sun in his eyes all the time. “Yeah, and it’s not Eli. It’s Hawk.”

Demetri channeled his inner theatre kid — not hard to do, since he only had to draw from his experiences as a techie during the high school’s performance of ‘Grease’ last year — and dramatically slid _Hawk’s_ phone from the desk behind him into the palm of his hand.

Hawk glowered. Miguel tapped him lightly on the chest with the back of his hand. “Dude, what are you doing?”

“Checking that the world hasn’t started turning the wrong way and the apocalypse hasn’t started happening,” he answered, easily getting past Hawk’s password. For all that his new look did for him, the guy still hadn’t changed it from the Konami code. _U-U-D-D —_

— Hawk snatched it back quicker than Demetri could register the motion. _Karate_ , Demetri thought, disparagingly. “Funny,” he said. “I could kick your ass for that.”

“Geez, is everything that comes out of your mouth generated by one of those Internet AIs people feed movie scripts to?” Demetri said. Then he paused, thought for a second. If Hawk was changing his name… “Pronouns?”

“Still he/they,” Hawk confirmed. They scratched the back of their head. Some things didn’t change, Demetri thought. “I’d let you know if they were different. Just — don’t talk about stuff like that in front of Sensei Lawrence, okay? He’s pretty old-school.”

“Trust me,” said Demetri, “I am never setting foot in ‘Cobra Die’ again.”

“It’s Cobra _Kai_ ,” Miguel corrected. He frowned. “Sensei Lawrence understands new stuff when you explain it to him,” he said. “When he’s not drunk. I mean, like when Aisha came out.”

“Well, when Aisha came out, Sensei said that he was glad he could give her girl advice the same as the rest of us,” Hawk said. They rocked back in their chair, hands clasped over their chest, like they were Bender from the Breakfast Club. “I’m not sure how he would handle personal pronouns.”

“Does he even know what pronouns are?” Demetri couldn’t help but ask.

Hawk gave him his patented stink-eye. _Don’t talk shit about our Sensei_ , he seemed to say. _Only we can talk shit about our Sensei_. “Did you guys do the world history presentation? I was, uh, busy at the weekend.”

Demetri looked at Miguel. Miguel smiled guiltily, shrugged. Demetri rolled his eyes. “Luckily for you two, Classical Greek mythology is my jam.”

Hawk coughed something that sounded very similar to _middle school Percy Jackson hyper-fixation_.

“Shut up,” Demetri continued. “What’s ‘busy’, anyway? We’re nerds. We’re allergic to anything but our computers.”

“Now who’s sounding like a movie script,” Miguel pointed out. He had a point, Demetri decided. He was one pocket protector away from being George McFly. “Anyway, Hawk was _busy_ getting this badass tattoo; it’s so cool, it’s like, this hawk on his back —”

“You got a tattoo?”

Hawk gave him the Look again. “Yes.”

“You got a tattoo and you didn’t _take_ me?” Demetri spluttered. “Dude! We’ve been planning our Portal ones since we were, like, 13!”

“Portal?” Miguel asked. “Oh, I love that game! I played the co-op mode with my Yaya. It was literally _so_ fun.”

Demetri grinned. “Have you ever played Half-Life? It’s —”

“All connected,” Miguel finished. His smile showed off his braces. “We should add each other and play sometime. Yaya and me didn’t get to the end of the campaign — she threw one of her slippers at the XBOX during a hard level and it was pretty much Red Ring of Death central.”

Then Hawk pretty much exploded. “Look, I don’t want anything to do with that nerd shit, anymore, okay?” they whispered harshly, leaning forward onto the desk. “Stop talking about it. No-one’s going to respect us if all we do all day is talk about stupid insular geek stuff. We’re repelling everyone around us, including all the girls — and guys too —” he said, gesturing at Miguel, who gave him a thumbs up — “because whenever anyone else is around, we all just huddle in a circle and start jerking off about obscure _Linux_ releases!”

Demetri waited a full two seconds, which was pretty much a personal best. “Been keeping _that_ one in, haven’t you?”

“I kind of agree,” Miguel said. Demetri glowered at him as subtly as he could, which even he knew wasn’t much. “And this is not because we both do karate and we have a bond because of that, even though we do. But we don’t talk about karate all the time. We should talk about other things and _to_ other people. You know, high school’s _for_ that.”

“And this isn’t because you want to talk to Sam,” Demetri said.

“Not entirely,” said Miguel.

“Good enough for me, _losers_ ,” Hawk said. There _was_ some malice in it, but Demetri was 97 percent sure that it was put-on because he’d caught them watching a livestream of bunnies on Twitch once in study period. “You guys catch The Bachelor last night? Some dude escaped, jumped over a fence.”

“How does talking about The Bachelor fit, at all,” Demetri said, pointing at the mohawk again, because he had to criticise all of it a _little_ , “with this new style you’ve developed?”

“This? These are just clothes and a haircut,” Hawk said, cool as ice and just as smooth. “Real change happens up here.” He tapped his temple. “Right?”

Miguel nodded. “Like with karate. Which we’re not talking about,” he reminded.

“Great,” Demetri said. He sighed. “Okay, why did this guy pull a prison break?”

As Hawk began to go into detail — and, dear God, how did American politics fit so much into one reality show about polyamory? — Demetri tried his best to take it in as if it were any kind of pop culture he was going to eventually absorb into his personality in the form of random facts. It was pretty easy, anyway. Hawk was still his friend. Friends listened to each other, even when one’s gone through a massive change in their lives — or on their head.

Yeah, Demetri decided, ignoring the teacher as she came in. He was glad Miguel and Hawk were his friends. It was a lot less sad having two rather than one, anyway and he was pretty sure the Subway Surfers cosplay could wait until Comic Con the next year, as soon as they found a character for Miguel and they lifted the moratorium on Karate Slash Nerd Shit.

Whenever that was. Demetri didn’t really care.

**Author's Note:**

> (References: the character _Spike_ from the mobile game Subway Surfers, general teen bullies from 80s coming of age movies, the Christian Minecraft server meme, Grease the Musical, the Konami Code, machine learning, the Percy Jackson series, the Portal series, the Half-Life series, the XBOX 360 'Red Ring of Death', Linux, the character _George McFly_ from Back to the Future and The Bachelor franchise. Phew.)
> 
> (When Hawk eventually tells him, and then actually explains, Johnny ultimately thinks that the ‘they’ pronoun is awesome, because it makes the person seem like a “badass legend of obscure myth, or something” and assigns them Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to watch as homework. It went well.)
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3


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